Robert Fisk: Hypocrisy is Exposed by the Wind of Change

    So when the Arabs cry out for the very future
    that Obama outlined, we show them disrespect.

Robert Fisk
Guardian (UK)
February 10, 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-hypocrisy-is-exposed-by-the-wind-of-change-2209881.html

There is nothing like an Arab revolution to show up the
hypocrisy of your friends. Especially if that
revolution is one of civility and humanism and powered
by an overwhelming demand for the kind of democracy
that we enjoy in Europe and America. The pussyfooting
nonsense uttered by Obama and La Clinton these past two
weeks is only part of the problem. From "stability" to
"perfect storm" - Gone With the Wind might have
recommended itself to the State Department if they
really must pilfer Hollywood for their failure to adopt
moral values in the Middle East - we've ended up with
the presidential "now-means-yesterday", and "orderly
transition", which translates: no violence while ex-air
force General Mubarak is put out to graze so that ex-
intelligence General Suleiman can take over the regime
on behalf of America and Israel.

Fox News has already told its viewers in America that
the Muslim Brotherhood - about the "softest" of
Islamist groups in the Middle East - is behind the
brave men and women who have dared to resist the state
security police, while the mass of French
"intellectuals" (the quotation marks are essential for
poseurs like Bernard-Henri Lévy have turned, in Le
Monde's imperishable headline, into "the intelligentsia
of silence".

And we all know why. Alain Finkelstein talks about his
"admiration" for the democrats but also the need for
"vigilance" - and this is surely a low point for any
'philosophe' - "because today we know above all that we
don't know how everything is going to turn out." This
almost Rumsfeldian quotation is gilded by Lévy's own
preposterous line that "it is essential to take into
account the complexity of the situation". Oddly enough
that is exactly what the Israelis always say when some
misguided Westerner suggests that Israel should stop
stealing Arab land in the West Bank for its colonists.

Indeed Israel's own reaction to the momentous events in
Egypt - that this might not be the time for democracy
in Egypt (thus allowing it to keep the title of "the
only democracy in the Middle East") - has been as
implausible as it has been self-defeating. Israel will
be much safer surrounded by real democracies than by
vicious dictators and autocratic kings. To his enormous
credit, the French historian Daniel Lindenberg told the
truth this week. "We must, alas, admit the reality:
many intellectuals believe, deep down, that the Arab
people are congenitally backward."

There is nothing new in this. It applies to our
subterranean feelings about the whole Muslim world.
Chancellor Merkel of Germany announces that
multiculturalism doesn't work, and a pretender to the
Bavarian royal family told me not so long ago that
there were too many Turks in Germany because "they
didn't want to be part of German society". Yet when
Turkey itself - as near a perfect blend of Islam and
democracy as you can find in the Middle East right now
- asks to join the European Union and share our Western
civilisation, we search desperately for any remedy,
however racist, to prevent her membership.

In other words, we want them to be like us, providing
they stay away. And then, when they prove they want to
be like us but don't want to invade Europe, we do our
best to install another American-trained general to
rule them. Just as Paul Wolfowitz reacted to the
Turkish parliament's refusal to allow US troops to
invade Iraq from southern Turkey by asking if "the
generals don't have something to say about this", we
are now reduced to listening while US defence secretary
Robert Gates fawns over the Egyptian army for their
"restraint" - apparently failing to realise that it is
the people of Egypt, the proponents of democracy, who
should be praised for their restraint and non-violence,
not a bunch of brigadiers.

So when the Arabs want dignity and self-respect, when
they cry out for the very future which Obama outlined
in his famous - now, I suppose, infamous - Cairo speech
of June 2009, we show them disrespect and casuistry.
Instead of welcoming democratic demands, we treat them
as a disaster. It is an infinite relief to find serious
American journalists like Roger Cohen going "behind the
lines" on Tahrir Square to tell the unvarnished truth
about this hypocrisy of ours. It is an unmitigated
disgrace when their leaders speak. Macmillan threw
aside colonial pretensions of African unpreparedness
for democracy by talking of the "wind of change". Now
the wind of change is blowing across the Arab world.
And we turn our backs upon it.

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